Pages

Monday, September 7, 2015

Hidden Wisdom

Hidden Wisdom

An
Excerpt from The Power of the
Herd by Linda Kohanov

Imagine if a supervisor asked you to complete a
projectwith only 10 per- cent of the information available to you, if schools were
only committed to teaching 10 percent of what you would need to succeed in
life. And yet that’s precisely what’s happening as we overemphasize the spoken
and written word in business, education, and relationships. Once we realize
that only 10 percent of human interpersonal communication is verbal, we can
also recognize that telephone, computer, and text messaging innovations are
deceptively seductive tools that limit human potential. Excessive
dependence on these convenient devices creates voluntary learning disabilities
in the realms of emotional and social intelligence that ultimately foster a
kind of devolution if left unchecked over generations.

The tendency to treat the body as a machine already has a good four hundred
years of history behind it, starting with René Descartes’s influential philosophy
in the seventeenth century and reaching its apex in the twentieth-century
assembly line. Frederick Taylor’s famous time-and-motion study technique, for
instance, attempted to reach maximum productive efficiency by essentially
turning workers into robots. Luckily the same scientific methods that, for a
while, promoted a form of “mechanomorphism” in dealing with living beings have
recently given us some very good reasons to reconsider the body’s innate,
richly nuanced intelligence.

In his book The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential
for Leadership and Life, Robert K. Cooper actually predicts that the
“dinosaurs of the future will be those who keep trying to live and work from
their heads alone. Much of human brilliance is driven less by the brain in your
head than by newly discovered intelligence centers — now called ‘brain two and
brain three’ — in the gut and the heart. The highest reasoning and the
brightest ingenuity involve all three of those brains working together.”

Physiologists now know that there are more neural cells in the gut than in
the entire spinal column. As a result, the enteric (intestinal) nervous system
can gather information and adapt to the environment. The heart also serves as
an organ of perception. “In the 1990s,” Cooper reports, “scientists in the
field of neurocardiology discovered the true brain in the heart, which acts
independently of the head. Comprised of a distinctive set of more than 40,000
nerve cells called baroreceptors, along with a complex network of neurotransmitters,
proteins, and support cells, this heart brain is as large as many key areas of
the brain in your head. It has powerful, highly sophisticated computational
abilities.”

“Gut feelings” can no longer be dismissed as whimsical or delusional: both
the intestinal track and the heart have been shown to generate neuropeptides,
molecules carrying emotional information. In this way, the body serves as a
magnificent tuner, receiver, and amplifier for all kinds of information. It
feels, learns, and has definite opinions that sometimes contradict those of the
brain. As author and researcher Dr. Candace Pert asserts, your body is your
subconscious mind. Imagine the edge, the power and insight, the sheer
genius available to those who make this somatic wisdom conscious!

While science is finally embracing this concept, we already have a term for
people who tap the wonders of those other two corporeal intelligence centers:
we say they have “horse sense.” The expression, dating back to the 1800s,
refers to sound practical wisdom, a combination of finely tuned awareness,
common sense, and gumption. People with horse sense pay attention to that
“other 90 percent.” They “listen to their gut” as well as their minds when
making decisions and really “put their heart into it” once they commit to
action. There’s also an element of intuition involved, as in: “She’s got too
much horse sense to believe his story.” For this reason, it’s often thought of
as a mysterious gift that certain lucky people possess from birth.

You can develop horse sense at any age, most efficiently through
actually working with horses. In fact, it was that first spirited mare who
taught me to stand up for myself and read the true intentions of others. I was
in my thirties at the time, dealing with an aggressive yet secretive supervisor
at the radio station. As I learned to motivate and set boundaries with a
thousand-pound being, my two-hundred-pound boss suddenly seemed less
intimidating. I not only found that I could effectively challenge unreasonable
demands, I gained greater cooperation and respect as a result.

The practical applications were useful, of course. But something even more
exciting began to happen. The training my horses provided encouraged me to gaze
ever more deeply into the limitations of my own socially conditioned mind,
allowing me to glimpse “civilized” human behavior through a wider lens. Staring
at historical and current events from this new perspective, I realized that
whether I was a left-wing Democrat, a right-wing Republican, a fundamentalist
Christian, a radical feminist, a gay-rights advocate, a communist, fascist,
creationist, or scientist, my effectiveness in the world was likely to be
impaired by the same unconscious habits. Our ancestors had sailed across a
potentially hostile ocean to escape the ravages of persecution and tyranny,
hoping for a fresh start in the land of the free and the home of the brave,
only to build the wildly hopeful structures of democracy on the same faulty
foundation of long-buried, largely nonverbal assumptions and behaviors. For
this reason, I doubted technology would save us; neither would liberal or conservative
agendas based on the same worn-out neural pathways meandering through our fearful,
body-phobic, increasingly dissociative, egotistical, machine-worshipping heads.

###

Linda
Kohanov
speaks and teaches around the world. She founded Epona Equestrian Services to
explore the healing potential of working with horses and to offer programs on
everything from stress reduction and parenting to consensus building and
mindfulness. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.